Let us be clear, this Commission does not represent the political objectives of our organization and of the Mapuche autonomist movement that is active in the processes of territorial recovery.
Our policy continues to be national reconstruction and the liberation of the Wallmapu, objectives that, once again, are not understood or addressed by the Chilean political class and all its related sectors.
From the beginning we maintained that this Commission was doomed to failure, since, rather than representing the demands of the communities and groups that fight for their lands, it embodies the interests of big business and the latifundia that are today covered up in false discourses of peace and social welfare.
It is these sectors that seek to legitimize their own conception of “peace and understanding”, which is nothing more than a new device to ensure the best conditions to increase and accumulate their profits in our ancestral territoriality. For the same reason, this Commission also functions as a political and media instrument by trying to exclude the Mapuche autonomist movement, and to publicly affirm that the interests of the State and big capital are under threat, they impose their rules and their way of doing politics on the institutional Mapuche sectors. In fact, only the co-opted and functional sectors have had a voice.
In addition to the above, it is important to emphasize that a Commission that is born, meets and concludes in the midst of an active State of Exception on the territory that is the object of it, has no legitimacy. They want to “do politics”, even if the term is too big for them, with the gun on the table and the military besieging communities. Exhibiting with these “proclaimed democratic practices”, a great contradiction.
A Commission that arises in the midst of the militarization of the Wallmapu, and that gathers positions and information materials from the territories under these circumstances, does not meet even the slightest standards of respect for human rights in international matters. At the same time, it is a Commission that has operated since its inception under a neo-indigenous pattern, because the Mapuche communities were not consulted, nor who their representatives would be, nor what the central issues are, nor what the forms of resolution should be. This top-down and tutelary logic is heir to the oldest colonial political systems, where paternalistic representation was imposed by blood and fire.
The truth is that this logic prevents native peoples from having the right to decide on their reality, while others, powerful and noble, did so for them. Today the colonial and racist format of the Chilean capitalist state is repeated again.
Faced with this reality, which has permeated the mechanisms with which the State of Chile deals with the “indigenous question” for decades, the Mapuche autonomist movement emerged with force, from the ’90s, with its own politics, speaking and doing for ourselves, without others supplanting or representing us. But today again this situation was ignored – by the way – by the enlightened progressives behind the Commission.
And the most paradoxical thing is that those who do have a voice are the representatives of the political class and the anti-Mapuche business community.
They are those who for three decades think that the historical conflict between mobilized communities, the State and the representatives of capital in the Wallmapu is solved with persecution, criminalization, set-ups, trials and jail. It seems ridiculous that the supposed “dialogue” for peace, materialized with this Commission, includes precisely the militarists who do not want it and who have swelled their pockets at the expense of the usurping occupation. This is the case of paramilitary commandos, such as APRA, which carry out political operations, rather than acting as an association that represents a union in search of that supposed “peace.”
At the organic and operational level, it turns out to be a Commission built on quicksand, just as was the participation of the Mapuche in the Constituent Convention. For the same reason, by not reaching concrete agreements, the greatest achievement is to show this Commission in its work of preparing a diagnosis regarding what they have called the recovery of lands, an issue that in the Mapuche world makes absolutely no sense because our people, the communities, are absolutely clear about the territorial claims that interest us, to reestablish a territorial design that allows the reconstruction of our Nation People.
With this diagnosis, the Commission intends to justify that the mechanisms for the return of land exist, in the absence of a concrete and precise proposal that determines or makes the return of the territories a reality. However, it constitutes the “workhorse” to cover up a major deception, which is the imposition of marketing techniques, with corruption included, to rearrange the large capitalist investments in our ancestral territory.
A diagnosis that will be presented as a great objective, but that will not be concluded with this government. Nor will the territorial returns that will be long-term and that will only indicate or establish a type of mechanism, a type of form to politically seek compromises and negotiations in future governments.
In short, this new Commission constitutes a real farce, a new foolishness and will form one more link for the current administration, the current neoliberal governance, to project a future government that will be in the hands of the far right.
Seeking peace and understanding to the exclusion of those who struggle is the big question, how can peace be sought in a context of militarization and greater repression? Even more so, with the existence of many Mapuche political prisoners (PPM) who have been prosecuted and convicted only for representing the territorial, autonomist and revolutionary struggle through ideas, forces and political proposals for the reconstruction of our people. Nothing has been said about the weichafe that are kidnapped by the Chilean state. Because as long as there is militarization and Mapuche political prisoners, it is not even possible to initiate dialogues that lead to agreements.
The existence of the PPM occurs in a context of greater persecution and on the basis of exceptional laws that take us back to dictatorial times. In fact, today there are Mapuche political prisoners as a result of the most sophisticated policies to repress and persecute the autonomist movement, which with more strength has taken on the struggle against extractivism and for the reconstruction of our people, processes sustained with the recovery of territorial spaces, today mainly in the hand of the forestry companies.
As a prelude to the presentation of the agreements or the points of the Commission for Peace and Understanding, a real media campaign has been implemented in which the most fascist sectors of the Chilean right participate, obviously covered by the media that are at their service, where the discourse that demonizes the Mapuche cause is reinstated, condemning the violence exercised by communities for territorial recovery.
A discourse that reinstates the concepts of terrorism, rural violence, organized crime to delegitimize and depoliticize the just struggle for territory.
On the other hand, the idea of a supposed agreement for the return of lands is being installed in which there would be a huge amount of money that will be available for territorial reparation to the communities, which is part of the farce that we already know, because in fact this proposal is always diluted along the way and in the end ends up in squalid resources and in almost no viability of land return.
This is a constant under the legislation in force with the participation of CONADI, a rotten and functional organism of the capitalist state. There will only be money to repair the large landowners and to swell the coffers of the forestry companies, who make a big business with the financial speculation of the purchase and sale of the estates usurped from the communities.
Undoubtedly, a new political operation has been launched that tries to give strength and importance to a Commission that in reality has nothing to offer for the resolution of the conflict, because the confrontation is installed on structural, economic foundations, which imply the struggle of an oppressed native people against an invading colonial state and in the face of which there is already a process of struggle and resistance for the reconstruction of the the Mapuche Nation.
The current Mapuche struggle is and will be for territory and autonomy for the Mapuche Nation.
The struggle continues!!
Amulepe taiñ weichan !!
SOURCE: Werken Noticias
By Héctor Llaitul / Resumen Latinoamericano, May 4, 2025